The Man Who Came to Dinner

PERHAPS the highest compliment I can pay Beryl Bainbridge is an admission that I've been reading her books for almost 30 years and still don't quite know what to make of them. Her novels may be uniformly spare, but they're hardly tight; each one seems as weirdly elastic as the whole slippery oeuvre. One picks up her contemporaries, like David Lodge and Anita Brookner, expecting not just skillfulness but a decided familiarity from book to book. With Bainbridge, one hardly knows what the subject will be or what effects to count on, other than flashes of mordant genius. ''Poor people appear predatory owing to their bones showing,'' she wrote in her 1998 novel, ''Master Georgie,'' an observation that might be described as not only ne'er so well expressed but ne'er thought by anyone else to begin with.

Bainbridge is the eccentric bridesmaid of modern British fiction: her publisher by now mentions with as much pique as pride the fact that she has been a finalist for the Booker Prize five times. Still more Liverpool than London, Bainbridge preceded her writing career with years as an actress. In fact, she has always practiced the novel more as a performing than a fine art; a reader never feels certain that one of her characters won't forget his lines or disappear beneath a falling sandbag. There is a curiously temporary feel to her books, a sense that her plots and people hang on the whim of a raffish creator who may get bored with them just as a reader is experiencing maximum involvement. (She once listed ''sleeping'' and ''smoking'' among her avocations.)

Bainbridge's imaginative territory has expanded farther into the past as her career has gone on. Recent novels have involved the Crimean War (''Master Georgie''), Scott's expedition to the Antarctic (''The Birthday Boys'') and the Titanic (''Every Man for Himself''), whose sinking she staged with a less panoramic but more interesting lens than James Cameron's: in the midst of the disaster, a rosary-saying priest, ''a bear of a man with a great splodge of a nose . . . gabbled rather than spoke, the responses swirling about him like the hectic buzzing of disturbed bees.''

Now, in ''According to Queeney,'' Bainbridge goes farther back, to the unlikely subject matter of Samuel Johnson and his friend Mrs. Thrale. The relationship is familiar, if still slightly elusive, to all Johnsonians. Around 1765, Dr. Johnson made the acquaintance of the wealthy brewer Henry Thrale and his attractive young wife, Hester. Mr. Thrale soon became the writer's Maecenas, providing comforts and entertainment far beyond anything Johnson had once so famously failed to squeeze from Lord Chesterfield. At Streatham Park, the Thrales' country estate, the melancholy lexicographer soon had his own apartment and library. According to his first biographer, the famously ''unclubbable'' Sir John Hawkins, Johnson would keep Mrs. Thrale up late making tea for him, and then indulge in ''the dangerous practice of reading in bed.'' A more recent biographer, Walter Jackson Bate, reminds us that Johnson's life with the Thrales was not a ''perpetual salon,'' however much his hosts enjoyed the cultural status and celebrities he brought their way. The Thrales' children also became, according to Bate, ''very much a part of Johnson's life.''

In her new novel, Bainbridge seeks to explore this long stretch of Johnson's existence as it appeared to Hester's namesake daughter, nicknamed Queeney, and sometimes called Sweeting by the Thrales' formidable friend. The resulting picture is more petty than pretty. Queeney finds the large, complicated man who teaches her Latin to be unusually aware of children's needs and personalities (''a quality singularly lacking in my mother''), but she still ''cannot in all honesty say that I loved him -- he was too large, too variable in mood, too insistent on the attention of my mother.'' There was also ''the often strong odor about his person.''

Johnson and Mrs. Thrale here seem less mutually idolatrous (as we sometimes choose to remember them) than snappish and scolding, or sometimes just tentative: ''Familiar as she was with his moods it was not always possible to find the correct approach.'' Anyone looking for a portrait of civilized high life -- volleys of wit resolving themselves into comforting good sense -- has come to the wrong writer. Bainbridge, in her odd, macabre way, delights in sucking the air and light from Streatham until it almost becomes one of the mingy little postwar Englands she first became famous for depicting. This version of the Johnsonian circle seems about as sparkling as the daft and creepy cast of characters Bainbridge once herded into a Welsh holiday camp in ''Another Part of the Wood,'' one of her earliest and most underrated novels.

Mother-daughter conflict of a rather ordinary sort lies at the heart of ''According to Queeney.'' Children generally hate to see their parents showing off -- acting, in short, like children -- but the cold-natured Queeney is more than usually maddened by such occasions. After Henry Thrale's death in 1781, Mrs. Thrale declares her intention to marry Gabriel Piozzi, Queeney's music teacher, thereby provoking -- in the novel as in life -- an angry fuss from her daughter and something like heartbreak in Johnson, who went about destroying her letters before his death in 1784.

Toward the end of Bainbridge's book, Johnson shrewdly locates the trouble between Hester and Queeney by declaring them to be, in their way, too close, something others lack the imagination to see. Queeney's summation of her mother's relationship with Johnson -- sufficient to say she needed an audience and he a home'' -- is, of course, quite insufficient. But the novel is kept from getting to the bottom of it by the adult Queeney's effort to forget things instead of figuring them out: ''It cannot be repeated too often that circumstances surrounding my early life were such that certain events cannot be recalled without grave disturbance of spirits.''

By now most students of 18th-century literature know the psychoerotic suppositions that have been made about Johnson and Mrs. Thrale (said to involve corporal discipline) as surely as history readers know of Gladstone's prostitutes and Catherine's horse. Bainbridge does not allow these rumors to dominate the novel, though we get hints of the situation in the draft of a letter from Mrs. Thrale to Johnson, found by Queeney on her mother's work table: ''Do not quarrel with your governess for not using the rod enough.'' There is also a foot-fondling incident, witnessed when Queeney enters the room ''complaining of a sourness to her breakfast milk.''

The decades after Johnson's death gave rise to a competitive industry of memoirs -- the ponderous Hawkins biography; books of anecdotes and letters from Mrs. Thrale; and, of course, the ''Life of Johnson'' from her jealous foe, Boswell. Bainbridge's conceit is to carry the gossip into the next generation, with Queeney making perfunctory reply to written inquiries by Hawkins's daughter for yet another book on the Johnson circle. (Laetitia Hawkins did exist, producing, along with memoirs, her ''Letters on the Female Mind,'' which deplored the French Revolution more strongly than Johnson had the American.) Queeney wishes not to deal with the ''baggage of the past'' or, as Bainbridge has her put it in a letter to Fanny Burney, another novel-writing descendant of the circle: ''Had I been born into a family unacquainted with Dr. Johnson, whose reputation as a man of letters appears to burn ever brighter, I would not be forever facing myself.''

The epistolary portions of this new book make formal sense for a work set in Dr. Johnson's era, but the letters occur only intermittently in a novel told for the most part in the third person -- a peculiar strategy that fails to deliver the subjectivity promised by the title. Beyond that, too much of the material may have been written of too many times and too well for Bainbridge ever to have made much headway with it.

''According to Queeney'' has its share of sharp, offbeat perceptions, as well as the grotesque comic touches that have always been one of Bainbridge's strongest suits. (When conversation turns to an actor's losing his teeth in the middle of a performance, ''Mrs. Thrale was aware there wasn't one among them, herself included, who wasn't secretly engaged in running their tongue along their gums.'') If this isn't Beryl Bainbridge's finest or most ambitious work, much of what's always been striking and irreducible about her still abides within it. As Johnson himself said in prefacing his Dictionary: ''Many seeming faults are to be imputed rather to the nature of the undertaking, than the negligence of the performer.''